Piracy has been a hot topic issue in gaming since the dawn of rock
paper scissors. Spanning such nebulous issues as consumer rights, copyright,
fair use, and ethics, it is not difficult to understand why the issue of piracy
is continuously raised. Recently, the conversation has steered towards the
notion that piracy may be undercutting profits sufficiently that harsh measures
ought to be implemented. I feel these methods are ineffective while also
harming the consumer. On the flip side, no anti-piracy measures or Digital Rights Management (DRM) at all could
lead to an industry-wide downturn which is also bad for the consumer.
First Things First – Piracy is Evil!
Before delving in, I think it should be said that I feel
that piracy is pretty much ethically wrong in almost every conceivable
scenario. It is stealing through and through and I think that those who posit piracy
as a victimless crime are deluding themselves. While I do not intend to
elaborate the argument fully here, I do find the case where a product is simply
unavailable with no way at all to compensate the creator/owner to be a somewhat
compelling argument to narrowly justify piracy in an extremely unlikely set of
circumstances. If you are the last person on Earth, I suppose that stealing a
game to keep yourself sane is akin to taking food to keeping yourself alive.
The common justifications of “I want to try it before I buy it”, “I can’t
afford it”, and certainly “they make enough money anyways” are, plainly put,
dumb and unworthy of serious consideration. Still, other arguments may have the
veneer of cogency and ought to be addressed and dismantled to prevent them from
being wrongly applied as justification for unjustifiable behaviour. To make it
perfectly clear: piracy is bad, piracy should be stopped, and piracy is
unjustifiable.
How to lose friends and money – Always Online DRM
The above said, I do think that publishers and developers
have been a bit overzealous in the way they combat piracy. Often, it seems the
mentality is that to stop or catch the bad eggs it is necessary to punish
everyone. Recently, the advent of ‘always online’ games seems to be squarely targeted
at curbing piracy at the cost of law-abiding consumers. Pirates are going to
have a hard time stealing a game if it needs to connect to a server controlled
by the publisher where, presumably, any connecting client can be vetted to
determine if it is authentic. This implies, however, that those who have
legitimately purchased the software also have to connect. The problem here is
that, if the server goes down or the consumer has lost their internet
connection, they have effectively lost the ability to use the product they paid
for. This might all be legal through the use of densely worded license
agreements but it seems intuitively wrong that the product I have purchased
could suddenly stop functioning at the whim of the publisher.
Another, perhaps less obtrusive, instance of a punish-all
approach is by forcing consumers to register their game in order to access
specific features. While often the
locked away features are community feeds that have little direct impact on the
main game, this does not change the fact that some parts of the paid product are
locked away until I have proved my copy is legitimate. Of concern here is that
registering typically requires giving personal information and agreeing
to terms of service that often authorizes the publisher to use this data as
they see fit. Most publishers really only use this info to shill their own
products but who’s to say that if they go defunct that your information will not
be auctioned off to a less scrupulous company.
Draconian measures, such as those employed above, might be palatable
if they effectively slammed the door on piracy. Unfortunately, in most cases, anti-piracy
measures are eventually circumvented and the consumer is left feeling the
pain. Recently, Sim City implemented an ‘always online’ requirement that led to
massive service disruptions at launch and left many legitimate purchasers
unable to play the game. Aggravatingly, EA-Maxis suggested that it was nigh
impossible for an offline mode to be implemented while simultaneously footage
of some pirated versions running offline emerged. Rightfully, Sim City ended up
as PR disaster and sales were almost certainly negatively impacted because of
it.
No-DRM is best... Not quite.
The Sim City case naturally leads to questions if
anti-piracy measures are worth it for the publisher. Unfortunately, this is not
an easy question to answer. On one end, I think that no matter what a publisher
does, someone is probably going to find a way to play their game without paying.
Further, I think that publishers need to realize that each pirated copy does
not equate to a lost sale. Some pirates are just never going to buy your game no matter what, these people should be
tracked down and prosecuted and the dream of converting them to a sale should
be abandoned. Further, I think that by making a game more difficult to access
illegitimately, some sales are protected. Finally, consumers need to recognize
that higher sales are better for the games industry all around. A higher profit
incentive inspires bigger budgets for games and entices fringe and independent
developers to enter the industry while also facilitating lower consumer prices.
All this together means, for me, that some anti-piracy measures should be
implemented to the benefit of the publisher and the consumer.
At this point, I would like to discuss the case of CD
Projekt RED who has famously embraced the removal of any DRM/anti-piracy
measures from their games. While I think their intentions are laudable, I think
they will ultimately end up hurting the industry in the long-term. CD Projekt
RED’s major releases (The Witcher and its sequel) have met with both critical
and commercial success. As such, they are the poster child for how anti-piracy
measures are unnecessary to ensure significant profit. Further, some of their
success has been attributed to their piracy stance drumming up goodwill within
the community. While this is undoubtedly true, I suspect this goodwill spreading
industry-wide is a mirage. If every publisher removed their anti-piracy
measures tomorrow I don’t think we would suddenly see an uptick in sales across
the board. CD Projekt RED has tapped into an ‘anti-DRM’
sentiment amongst the community that can only spread so far; consumers have
opted to purchase their products because of their piracy stance instead of
others (it is not as though consumers suddenly have more money because of CD
Projekt RED’s piracy stance). What this means is that if every company
implemented a similar attitude towards piracy, CD Projekt RED would probably
lose those goodwill sales to other companies. If this were the case, then all
companies would be on equal footing and sales attrition due to piracy would
still exist. The concern is that if other companies feel they need to dump
anti-piracy measures in order to compete, the perceived increase in profits
would be coming at the expense of another company as opposed to the pirate. I
do not think it is inconceivable that if every company removed anti-piracy
measures from their game, larger publishers would take a fairly significant hit
based on the dumb “they make enough money anyways” logic and overall industry-wide
sales would drop (as mentioned above, this is also ultimately bad for the consumer).
The Luke Warm Pee Spot in the Pool
So, if both overly-aggressive and non-existent anti-piracy
measures are bad, then that leaves the Goldilocks “just right” middle zone. As stated before, I think that no matter what DRM is implemented, someone somewhere is going to circumvent it. Thus, I think the goal of DRM should be to make a game sufficiently difficult to pirate to protect the crucial launch sales period instead of attempting to be a permanent barrier. I
do not have a perfect solution that fits here but I think some examples can be
shown that are along the right lines. The solution of developers releasing
their own hacked versions to popular pirating sources is semi-effective and
hilarious. In these cases, a would-be pirate downloads the game only to find
that the difficulty has been increased to absurd levels or all of the dialogue is
replaced with text about how piracy is evil. This creates the situation where
only the pirate is affected and the legitimate purchaser is totally unscathed.
The problem here is that even the hacked versions will eventually
be ‘fixed’ by pirates but hopefully the trap versions of the game would create enough early confusion in the pirate community to protect launch sales. Another option is
the tried and true cd-key method. This requires the user to possess a key code
bundled with the game in order to install the software. However, these keys
rely on an algorithm and have proven to be easily mimicked/circumvented. Again, the idea here is that the algorithm takes a bit of time to crack thus protecting early sales. Finally, a
solution whereby strong server-checking DRM is implemented only for a few months and then patched out of the game later protects sales during the most critical period while ensuring that a legitimate purchaser will not suddenly lose access to their game years later when the servers are shut off. This, of course, does not eliminate the potential for server jams while the DRM is active.
In the end, I think most people will agree that piracy is
bad for the games industry and that overall lower sales ultimately equate to inferior
products and worse choice for the consumer. Strong anti-piracy measures, such as always online
requirements, alienate consumers whereas no anti-piracy measures could lead to
an industry wide downturn. Ultimately some median between the two ought to be
reached for the betterment of all.